Stay on target

We’ve written a lot of positive thoughts about Razer over the years, mostly because they manufacture a lot of quality products. From high-end keyboards and mice and headphones to gaming laptops and cell phones, there are real reasons for gamers to be loyal to that glowing green snake. But now Razer is counting on that gamer loyalty for something that honestly sounds a lot more sketchy. Razer wants you to use those beefy PCs they sell you to mine cryptocurrency you don’t even get to keep.

The program is called Razer SoftMiner and if you’re familiar with how cryptocurrency generally works it shouldn’t sound too different. Download the program onto your computer, preferably one with powerful graphics cards like the recommended Nvidia GTX 1050 or AMD RX 460. And leave it idle as it churns ungodly amounts of energy using math to create fake money like the ether token of Ethereum blockchain and others. You can even earn while playing games through Razer’s Cortex desktop app.

Where Razer SoftMiner differs however is that once the crypto is mined, you don’t get to keep it. Instead, it’s sent to a separate gaming-centric cryptocurrency service called GammaNow so Razer doesn’t deal with the messy management. In exchange, mules like you and me get a different currency, Silver, to score sweet discounts on products from Razer and partners. You can mine an estimated 500 Silver per day. The Razer store offers Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Steam for 98,000 Silver. 196 days of electricity-draining, GPU-straining crypto mining for a $60 game that’ll surely be on sale soon? Sure doesn’t sound like a pyramid scheme to me!

Razer SoftMiner is still in beta, so hopefully there’s still time for the whole thing to fall apart when someone looks at it too closely. If you’re going to mine cryptocurrency, at least have the self-respect to keep yourself. For more on cryptocurrency absurdity check out this headmaster fired for secretly mining Bitcoin at schools, Oscar Mayer’s bacon-based currency, and hot details on a heater that mines cryptocurrency.